I've been a Spotify user since 2008, first as a free listener, then as a Premium subscriber. Spotify's excellent features have helped me discover many artists and bands that I fell in love with, but in recent times, it's become an AI-infested bin.

The first time I fell for an AI artist, I couldn't believe it. It seemed too good and indistinguishable from a real artist's music to my non-professional ears. If AI still fails to make convincing images, how could it possibly be good enough at music to fool me?

Oh, how wrong I was. Soon, I discovered that because I'd listened to that one artist, many of my recommendations were similarly AI-generated. My Spotify was ruined. That's when I decided to do something about it and stop it.

Fake artists are everywhere on Spotify

You just have to pay attention

About 90% of my music listening on Spotify is centered around my own playlists or those created by people I trust. But every once in a while, I use the radio or Spotify-generated mix playlists, and end up on the algorithm's side of music streaming.

That's where things started going wrong. One day, I was playing music while working and enjoying it without actively focusing on it. Soon, an "artist" name popped up enough times that I stopped to check them out — "Apukat." Every song was exactly up to my taste.

Their metalcore, symphonic and modern arena rock vibe was such a perfect fit with the music I enjoy as a fan of Linkin Park, Muse, Apocalyptica, Nightwish, Within Temptation, etc. That should've been my first warning sign, the formulaic-ness of it.

It took me a while to feel sketchy about this music. By then, my Spotify had been overtaken by more AI artists. Beyond Apukat, my two biggest heartbreaks are Glum Aleks and Ministry of Dark. Their music was so up to my speed. Some of the others are listed below:

  • Bleeding Verse
  • Ghost//Signal
  • Deathly Hours
  • Exiles of Eden
  • Shadows Awake
  • The Devil Inside
  • Obsidian Swing
  • Aventhis
  • The Velvet Sundown
  • Beyond Disdain
  • King Vagabond
  • Hexxenmind
  • Lyryxx
  • Soul's Cry
  • Breaking Rust

And this is just what I've run into in a few specific genres. I imagine there are more AI-generated artists and bands doing pop, country, folk, rap, R&B, EDM, country, or any and all genres of music. It couldn't just be prevalent in rock and Nordic metal.

Actually, let's rephrase this. I didn't run into this music, Spotify recommended it to me through its radio, Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes, and other artist and genre mix playlists. It pushed that music to me, without a single warning that it's all AI-generated.

A few signs that the music you're listening to is AI-generated

Listen carefully or open your eyes

As I mentioned earlier, some of the signs of AI-generated music are in the music itself:

  • Singing tones, accents, and timbres shift between songs.
  • You may find the same vocal artist singing with different "bands."
  • Lyrics are generic, lean into the genre's trope, and don't say anything too personal or too unexpected. They're the lowest common denominator you can think of.
  • Mixing sounds over-polished or full of artifacts, especially the instrumentation.
  • The music is too formulaic, too much of a good fit for the genre.

If, however, like me, you're not that good at detecting musical queues, there are other signs to pay attention to that any internet-savvy person should be able to detect:

  • There's no artist or band photo, just a generic and clearly AI-generated artist image.
  • All album and single covers follow the same pattern, too.
  • The Spotify bio is very vague and doesn't mention any person's name. Most of them use the word "project."
  • Song credits are very bare bones and don't list any real composers, producers, lyricists, instrument players, etc.
  • They've started publishing music in 2025 and are very prolific with multiple EPs and albums in the span of a year.
  • Their YouTube presence is full of AI-generated videos or lyrics videos.
  • They don't have any social media presence, and no upcoming tour or any presence on concert-tracking sites like Songkick or Bandsintown.

The two tools I use to weed out AI artists from my Spotify

There's no single toggle, you have to do the work

There isn't one easy way to tell Spotify you don't want to listen to AI music. Instead, the onus is on you, the user, to figure out whether what's being recommended to you is made by real artists or an AI platform like Suno or Udio.

Of course, you can do your own sleuthing, check Reddit to see what other people think, look up comments on YouTube, but I found two faster ways to do this.

The first one is a website called Sloptracker (screenshots above), a site made by a real musician who wants to raise awareness around the impact of AI-generated slop on real artists' income.

Sloptracker has an AI scanner that analyzes the frequency spectrum and timing patterns of any song (Spotify URL or MP3 file) to predict with 99% accuracy whether it was completely AI-generated, completely human-made, or processed by AI.

In my experience, it works really well and helped me verify that the artists I listed above triggered its red flags, too. It also lists the top detected AI artists, so you can have a quick scroll through them and see if any of them ring a bell.

Breaking Rust, for example, is estimated to have made $297,571 so far and be draining over 2,000 Premium subscriptions every month. That's money that could've gone to human artists if those subscribers had spent their time listening to human-made music.

The second tool I've found is Deezer's AI Music Detector, which can scan your entire music library from multiple services (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, Tidal, etc.) and tell you what it flags.

But the import and scan tool kept failing for me, so I found a Chrome extension that uses Deezer's built-in AI labeling to scan my playlists one by one. It's called DigiMuziek AI Spotter, and it only works if you're using Spotify's website, not the Windows or Mac app.

But it does exactly what I need it to do: quickly scan a playlist, tell me which artists it flags, let me instantly block them without going through them one by one on Spotify, and even auto-skip AI songs when playing music.

I can't tell you how many questionable recommendations I found in some of my playlists thanks to it. I easily weeded them out of my library.

However, pay attention to the fact that both of these tools are not foolproof. They flagged some very real artists like HOKKA and Blas Canto as AI-generated. I've seen both of them sing live (Joel Hokka was a member of Blind Channel).

It's like playing whack-a-mole

I've spent the past few weeks trying to remove as many AI artists and AI-generated music from my Spotify playlists and recommendations. The best way is to immediately tap Don't play this artist on any sketchy artist or band I spot.

But they keep popping up, more of them, all the time. Spotify has said it's working on labeling AI music, but artists will have to declare it themselves (ha!) and there's no toggle in the works to opt out of AI music by default. That sucks.

Studies show that most people can't detect AI-generated music and that more than 28% of new music being published on Spotify is AI-generated or edited. It's a lucrative business that doesn't require much effort, so why would anyone stop doing it?

Personally, I'd much rather my Premium money go to real artists, and until there's an easier way to do it, I'll continue fighting to fix my algorithm to only show me human-made music.